


Grounding Wires

by slipstream



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Autistic Character, Electrocution, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Dynamics, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, House Hunting, Hurt/Comfort, Sleep
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between the blood loss and the post-fight adrenaline crash from hell, all Donnie wants to do is close his eyes and not <i>be</i> for a while, but with a hole the size of New Jersey in what’s left of the fan room, most of the lair burned or half-buried in rubble, and Master Splinter still barely able to sit upright, that’s not about to happen any time soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow._

_I feel my fate in what I cannot fear._

_I learn by going where I have to go._

_-Theodore Roethke_

* * *

 

“Donnie...” A voice in the dark, close and quiet enough that it’s barely more than a warm puff of breath against his ear slit. “You awake?”

Donatello’s fingers twitch against the crumbling foam of their sleeping pad, trying to burrow back into sleep like so much loose sand. The foam is rough against his cheek, almost uncomfortably coarse against the softer skin under his eye, but he likes the way it presses against him everywhere else, firm but flexible and smelling comfortably of must.  

“Donnie? _Donnie_! Psst!” A hand brushes against his shoulder, the back of his neck, feather light and cloying. “Wake up.”

The touch slips under his shell like ice, turns electric hot as it races down his ribs to curdle under his plastron, deep where he can’t scratch. He groans in protest, tries to withdraw to the safety of _in_ , but his body doesn’t work the way instinct wants it to and there’s little room to maneuver with four of them crammed shoulder to shoulder on the mattress.

Sometimes the only way to escape a predator is to confront it.

Especially when that predator is your little brother.

His limbs are stiff from the long day carrying supplies through miles of half-flooded tunnels into this new space—dirty but dry and big enough that their footsteps echo in places—but eventually he manages to push himself up onto his elbows just far enough to turn his head back towards his left. Raphael mumbles something senseless as the foam dips beneath him but doesn’t wake.

“Wha’issit, Mikey?” he yawns.

“Hey.” Michelangelo hasn’t stopped touching him, but he’s shifted his grip to the thick denim of his coveralls. That’s better, that’s okay. “Wanna ask you somethin’.”

Donnie settles back down with a sigh. Mikey’s never been good at letting a line of thought wait until morning. “Yeah?”

There’s a faint rattle of snot as Michelangelo breathes, the ghost of the chest infection that’s haunted him for nearly a month now, prompting their move. Even though Donnie knows that it’s not a good thing, that it makes Dad’s brow crease and Leo bite at his bottom lip until his teeth leave a neat line of dents that don’t fade for hours and hours, he kind of likes the sound. Likes the rhythm and static of it.

“Whattaya think of this place?”

 Donnie shrugs. It’s pitch black in their underground home—they blew out all of the candles before going to bed—but this close Mikey’s sure to feel the gesture.

 “’S cool, I guess,” he mumbles. “Lotsa pipes, an’ the big fan...”

Dad had shown them all the fuse box in the corner that they were never, ever supposed to touch. They know about electricity and the little yellow triangles with jagged arrows humans use to remind each other how dangerous it is, and Dad’s been careful to emphasize over and over that just because something wasn’t working right then didn’t mean that it _couldn’t_. Donnie had fallen asleep thinking about the wires inside, so much thicker than the ones he finds in stereos, insulation cracked and falling away in places to show the glint of copper underneath.

“Yeah, the fan’s kinda cool, it’s just— _Hey!_ ” His tone shifts mid-word, curling in on itself in the way it does when Leonardo scolds him for breaking a rule or Raphael holds something up high where he can’t reach. Donatello’s brain sketches the accompanying expression across the black of his eyelids: Michelangelo with his brow furrowed, mouth twisted and puckered tight. “You really awake or just pretendin’?”

“Ow!” The well-aimed pinch to the soft skin under the rim of his shell yanks Donnie abruptly out of his half doze. “Stoppit!”

“Shadd _up_ ,” says Raph, annoyance graveled by sleep but loud enough to startle.  

“You shut up!” Mikey hisses, shifting under the covers as if to sit up, and now it’s Donnie grabbing at _his_ sleeve, pulling him close enough that the edges of their shells clack together.

“ _Shhhh!_ You’ll wake up Dad!”

There’s a sound from the foot of the mattress. Cloth against cloth.

Mikey goes stiff in his arms. They lie together, motionless, listening.

Donnie hopes that might be the end of it, but after several minutes Michelangelo starts to fidget again.

“I wish there was a candle,” he whispers. Sometimes Dad lets them keep one of the big scented ones burning, cocooning them all in a comforting circle of dim light and the faintly sour bite of citronella oil, but they’ll have to be careful with their supplies until Dad finishes scouting their new territory for the best places to scavenge. “It’s just—”

He sucks in a shaky breath.

Exhales.

“It’s so _big_.”

Donatello frowns, remembering Mikey’s whoop of delight when Dad first pushed open the heavy metal hatch two days ago, the brutal game of tag that had ensued once they’d all realized the true extent of the space.

“But you liked it plenty earlier.”

“Yeah, but—” Mikey shuffles even closer, away from the edge of the mat. “It’s _too_ big, y’know? You can’t even see the ceiling, some places.”

Donnie tries to understand, but he’s used to most of the world outside of his reach being vague and unknowable.

“Dad wouldn’t take us here if it wasn’t safe.”

More rustling. Mikey’s nearly on top of him now, the weight of him strangely comfortable despite the awkward angle. It’s enough to pull Donnie’s mind away from the way his breath tickles across his face and neck. “But what if...”

Cheek to cheek, it’s still almost too quiet to hear.

“Donnie, what if Dad’s _wrong_?”

If it were Leonardo lying here instead of dead to the world on the far side of Raphael he’d be quick to sooth his brother with hushed assurances that their father is never wrong, that he doesn’t make mistakes. Donatello knows better.

“Then we’ll _make_ it safe. Okay?”

He expects an argument or at least a couple of rounds of Mikey’s infamous strings of “Yeah, but _how_?”, but Michelangelo just murmurs “Okay...” and falls silent. Donnie opens his eyes and looks out into the seemingly endless nothingness beyond his brother’s shell. Stares until his eyes start to make shapes out of the black, flashing bluepink blotches that twist back on themselves in endless electric rorschachs, many-eyed, teeth sharp.

“Hey.” He nudges Mikey with an elbow. “Wanna switch places?”

He does. Donnie scoots over, careful not to kick the warm lump of fur curled protectively around their feet. Mikey is not as considerate. His plastron clatters loudly against Donnie’s shell as he scrambles over him, flopping gracelessly onto his own back with a grunt in a tangle of covers.

Raph whines at the sudden draft, then yelps as Mikey nails him with a misplaced hand in his attempt to flip over back onto his plastron. Donnie cringes, sure that they’ve woken Dad by now and braced for the gruff scolding, but their father’s tail only sweeps back and forth across the top of the well-worn blankets in three sure strokes, smoothing and tucking them back into place.

He relaxes, shifting to fit his body into the warm space left by his brother. Michelangelo’s whispered apology earns him a growl and halfhearted shove from Raphael, but the two quickly settle back into sleep, breaths slowing and deepening into the familiar rhythm Donatello knows so well, soft and warm against the distant, persistent plinking of water against stone.

He lies awake for a long time, thinking about the wires he isn’t supposed to touch. How they tangle together before branching out again, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs.

He wonders where they go, once they disappear into the dark.

 

*

 

Between the blood loss and the post-fight adrenaline crash from hell, all Donnie wants to do is close his eyes and not _be_ for a while, but with a hole the size of New Jersey in what’s left of the fan room, most of the lair burned or half-buried in rubble, and Master Splinter still barely able to sit upright, that’s not about to happen any time soon.

He has mostly blurred memories of the string of dead-end tunnels and abandoned utility outposts they lived in, one bleeding into another, before Sensei found this place. For most of their lives the lair has been their entire universe, a concrete shell of security carved out of the roots of humanity above. Now that that sanctity has been breached, there can be no rest. Even the five minutes spent grinning like idiots over a grumbling but very much alive Master Splinter while they passed around one of their big jugs of drinking water feels like a luxury that they’ll soon regret.

What if they come _back_?

What if there are more of them? With bigger guns and live rounds instead of tranq darts? They aren’t out in the open anymore with plenty of room for bullets to ricochet harmlessly, and Master Splinter lacks the thick plates of bone and keratin that saved them earlier.

What if...

It takes Donatello nearly an hour to reboot their security system and patch all of the priority perimeter sensors back onto the grid. While Michelangelo tends to Master Splinter, Raphael and Leonardo head out in the sewers to “make damned sure the coast is fucking clear.”

Despite taking minimal surface damage, the electrical in the kitchen is completely dead, so Mikey drags a hotplate over to the console station and commandeers a non-vital socket to make tea.

“Just don’t fucking spill it while I’m down here,” Donnie snaps from under the primary input station, buried up to his elbows in fried circuit boards and loose cables that snap and spit ominous sparks. His goggles are down in magnification mode, but one of his shoulder cams tracks a blur of movement in his peripheral vision and inserts a grainy pop-up of Mikey’s three-fingered “okay” into his optical display.

He’s just finished resuscitating the above-ground camera feeds when the main hatch creaks open.

“Aww, no love for the new side door?”

“You mean you ain’t blocked it up yet?” Even big as he is, Raphael can move as quietly as any of them, but he drops to the dojo floor with a heavy thud. “ Where were you raised, a fuckin' barn?”

Leo climbs in after him, his tread just as heavy with exhaustion. “Stay put, Mikey. We’ll get it.” Then, to Master Splinter: “No sign of the Foot. No maintenance crews, either. They must not have heard the explosions up top.”

“Pssh. Prob’ly thought it was just Raph lettin’ one rip, right? They’re just used to it, is— _owww_! What the hell, man? That was my blood-suckin’ arm.”

The kettle comes to a boil, drowning out most of Raph’s sputtered reply. Donnie untangles himself just long enough to tug his headphones up over his ear slits. They’re not plugged in to anything right now, but the design of them is just snug enough to pull a thick comforter over the rest of the world. He can still hear his brothers bickering as they drag the welded steel remnants of their couch out of the console room and shift chunks of concrete into a makeshift barricade, but it’s muffled under the closed, cupped-in sound of air against his eardrums and the even thump of his own heartbeat.  

He keeps working. He’s got a rhythm going, can see how four-six-twelve steps ahead if he reroutes a power supply _here_ and sacrifices an HVAC pump _there_ he can get the thermal cams back on, then the first layer of offensive deterrents, then the—

“C’mon, Don.” A hand claps around his ankle. “Break time.”

It’s Leo, he _knows_ it’s Leo, and he’s not tugging all that hard, isn’t even touching skin, but it still comes as a shock. He lashes out, nerves fried, but Leo dodges the kick with practiced ease.  

“Sorry.” He spreads his hands. “Thought you heard me earlier.”

Breathing hard, Donnie yanks up his goggles and jabs a finger towards his headphones. Leo grimaces.  

“Sorry,” he repeats, tilting his head towards the small clearing in the debris where Mikey has laid out cushions, tea cups, and several cans of room temperature Orange Crush. “Sensei wants us to sit with him for a bit.”

Donnie shakes his head reflexively. “In a minute. I just need to re-calibrate the bio profiles and then—”

“Donatello.” There’s a grunt of pain at the edge of his father’s voice, but it’s the same tone he uses when Donnie's attention drifts too far during meditation. Precise and faintly sing-song, like the sound his bo makes at the end of an uppercut. “Come and have some tea.”

Leonardo smiles at him softly and holds out his hand. At some point he’d pulled his mask down around his throat and splashed water across his face. It hadn’t been enough to completely wash away the grime and concrete dust clinging to his skin, and the rest has dried in streaks, grey against mottled green. He looks old, and at the same time very, very young.

Two hours ago they thought Master Splinter was going to _die_.

Donatello lets his brother pull him to his feet.

There’s a barely-singed cushion waiting for him in his customary spot between Raph and Mikey. He kneels, bowing his head briefly to his master, who returns the gesture with slow, measured fluidity.

“Coffee’s AWOL, bro,” Michelangelo shrugs, pressing a steaming cup of tea into his hands. Donatello nods and curls his fingers around the heat, craving the damp warmth fogging his glasses and the delicate familiarity of the chipped but functional porcelain more than the caffeine.

Raphael has an afghan spread out across his lap—an ugly orange and brown one he made before he got any good with a crochet hook. He thrusts the ragged edge of it towards Donnie, frown deepening into a scowl when Donnie makes no move to take it.

Is Raph cold? Donnie’s only had time to give the environmental controls a cursory examination, and snow this late in March is not exactly unheard of. They’ll be in serious trouble if the heat’s busted on top of everything else.

He blinks numbly at the wool lumped on his lap until Raph heaves a ragged sigh, digs out an old army blanket, and tosses it around Donnie’s shoulders.

Oh, right.

Battle shock.

Leo comes back from the kitchen with an armful of power bars and beef jerky, making sure everyone takes a double helping. Donnie chews at his mechanically. Even with their accelerated healing rates they’ll be anemic for a day or so. Raph had brushed off his earlier attempts to take a closer look at his cracked shell, and Donnie’s own thighs and forearms are burning from the strain of trying to hold up the crumbling tower. He’s pretty sure he pulled something in his bad left shoulder when they were all dangling in a human and mutant turtle daisy chain fifty stories above Times Square. He wonders what injuries everyone else might be hiding.

The meal settles into something almost like normalcy. Donnie finishes his first cup of tea without really tasting it, but the hot liquid and extra weight of the blanket loosens the thick bands of tension radiating out from under his shell. He smiles around a mouthful of jerky at the wide-eyed look on Leo’s face when he tears into his power bar with a little too much force and scatters granola crumbs all down his kasazuri, almost chokes when Raph’s snickering morphs into a stream of badly-suppressed cursing when his freshly-cracked can of soda fizzes traitorously down his front. Mikey passes him a second cup of tea, and it’s sweet this time, loaded up with enough sugar that there are undissolved crystals ghosting across the bottom. Just the way he likes it.

It’s enough, almost, to keep his insides from locking up again when Master Splinter sets down his empty cup and saucer and folds his hands neatly across his lap.

“My sons,” he says. “It has been a long and trying day. You have faced an enemy of great cunning and strength. Trained in shadow, you have walked in daylight for the first time and seen the world of humans at its best and at its worst. You have fought bravely for each other, for this family, for strangers and old friends newly met. And though your battles have left their scars, you have come back united and victorious. I cannot repeat how proud I am of each of you, both as your father and as your teacher.”

He closes his eyes, inhaling deeply. “I wish that I could spare you the burden of this heartbreak. Yet it is the harsh truth that every victory comes with its own losses.”

It’s harder to read Master Splinter sometimes, with his thick, dark fur and pointed face. Donatello shifts in his seat, glancing at each of his brothers to gauge their reactions. Michelangelo is sitting straighter than usual, mouth puckered and brow ridges tightly furrowed. Leonardo’s eyes lock briefly with his as he makes his own scanned survey, but his eldest brother turns quickly away, plump cheeks deeply creased.

Raphael is the easiest, eyes dark and shoulders hunched, arms folded tightly against his plastron.

“We can’t stay here, is what you’re sayin’.” The muscles of his face and neck ripple and clench as he shifts his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “It ain’t safe.”

Master Splinter flicks one ear briefly at the interruption but nods in acknowledgement. “It is uncertain that we will be truly safe anywhere. Our enemy has been struck low, but like the hydra we do not know what heads still lurk, ready to rise up and strike. Our home, our very existence, are no longer secrets we alone hold.”

Mikey’s hand shoots into the air.

“I trust April O’Neil,” he says, eyes round and clear. “Not sure about the other guy, but he helped bust us out and he never came down here. Plus I think he’s kind of a doofus nobody’d believe? So we should be cool.”

“It’s not Vern that I’m worried about,” Leo frowns. “It’s those Foot guys with the cattle prods.”

Raph’s lips pull back, flashing white, jagged teeth. “Yeah, and they’ve got us pre-programmed on GPS and a bad habit of not textin’ before they come over. So let’s get off our butts and _scram_ already.”

It’s like watching a movie, one of the badly-shot horror ones that Mikey loves. Grainy and stiffly-acted, the faces disconnected from the dialogue, but with a slow, creeping dread bubbling underneath all the same.

Donnie fists his hands tightly in the afghan to keep them from shaking.

Mikey raises his hand again, slowly this time.

“Could we nap first?” he asks. “Dunno about you guys, but I could _really_ go for a nap.”

“We all need rest,” Leo concedes.   “But I don’t know if we can afford to linger that long. Donnie? When’s the soonest you think we could leave?”

The good thing about Leonardo is that when he asks a question, he almost always is looking for a very literal answer.

“Ten minutes,” he says automatically. It isn’t as if the theoretical possibility of having to abandon ship hasn’t been brought up before. Dad used to make them do drills, when they were very young, and Donatello’s crunched the numbers on his own compulsively about once a week since installing the first version of their security system. “Fifteen if you want to be neat about it. But—”

His voice cracks halfway through the word. He swallows, adjusts his glasses, and starts again.

“But it leaves us vulnerable. We’d be taking base essentials only, and then only as much as we can carry. We’d be betting on it being enough to last us until we can find someplace else, restock our food supply, and re-establish basics like sanitation and fresh water.”

He slices through the air in front of him with his palm.

“Full reset. If anybody comes for us we’ll be on new turf with no warning system and no reserve to see us through even a minor complication.”

“Yeesh,” says Mikey, sticking out his tongue. “Sounds like a real fun camping trip.”

Leo runs his thumb along the long scar down his right cheek, thinking. “We’ve lived rough and on the run before. We can do it again.”

Anger spikes through Donatello, hot and electric. His memories of those years may be softened by time, but that doesn’t make them pleasant.

“We’re kinda bigger than we were when we were _four_ , Leonardo. We can’t exactly cram into a coffee can and live off apple cores and candy wrappers.”

“So what,” Raph prods. “You got a better idea?”

Donatello reaches unconsciously for his necklace, pulling and twisting the beads back and forth between his fingertips while he tries to regulate his breathing. Tries to ignore the way Raphael watches him, eyes glittering, the way Leonardo pointedly doesn’t.

“We could stay,“ he says at length. “For a while, at least. We’ll have more resources to find and evaluate a new place, and we’ll be better prepared to cover our tracks when we do make the move. We can make strategic choices about where we go instead of scrambling to make do in the first spot we hunker down in. In the meantime we salvage whatever equipment we can. We’d still be limited to stuff that can easily be carried, but we can make multiple trips. After the immediate survival gear we prioritize the weapons and security sensors, medical supplies, a few personal items. Maybe a couple of generators, depending on how far we have to go. Things that will be hardest to replace.”

There’s no way they’ll be able to carry most of his carefully-scavenged servers much further than a few blocks. Same with the kitchen appliances and all of their beds, but the servers are going to hurt the most. If he’s lucky he might be able to salvage some of the fiber optic cabling after he backs up the most crucial data blocks using his own mobile systems.

Raphael drains the last of his soda with a snort and crushes the can. “You sure it wouldn’t be easier to just hunt down the rest of Sacks’ goons and kill ‘em all?

“ _Dude_.” Mikey reaches behind Donnie’s shell to smack Raph’s meaty shoulder with the back of his hand. “Not cool, dude."

Donnie has to duck forward to avoid Raph’s own retaliatory shoulder strike. “You’re the one who wanted to kill April before you got a good look at her, dipshit.”

“Hey,” says Leo. “Language.”

Raph growls—a less than effective threat, given the afghan—but Leo holds his ground.

“We’re having a civil conversation about a serious decision we have to make as a family. One where we’re not killing _anyone_ unless we absolutely have to.”

“Well last I checked I’m part of this family, too, and I say it’s looking more and more like we shoulda killed a lot more of those bastards when we had the chance. And don’t give me that look—” Raph points at Donnie. “—like I’m the only one with my hands all dirty. You weren’t exactly tapping them politely on the shoulders with your bo.”

“I wasn’t giving you a _look_ ,” Donnie scowls. “That was battle. This is—”

“War.” Whether fighting with blades or fighting with words, Raphael’s nostrils flare in excitement each time he draws first blood. “Christ, wake up and smell the sewage, Don! You were the one in the fucking cage. You think they’re gonna come down here and treat us sweet when they can make some cash offa us dead as easy as they can alive? This is just the start of it, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna stop.”

“ _Enough_.”

Their master’s tone commands immediate obedience. They fall into silence, heads bowed.

“Each of you will prepare a pack with whatever necessities for your physical and spiritual health you can carry.”

Donatello knows there’s nothing logical about the way the embers of his anger blaze bright into panicked betrayal, but the instinct to fortify, to withdraw fully into a hard shell of known safety is too hard to ignore. “Sensei—”

Master Splinter stills him with a raised claw. “As a contingency. We must be prepared at all times for immediate flight. However, I agree that to allow the specter of our enemies to chase us blindly from our stronghold into parts unknown when we are able to defend it for a while longer would be tactically unsound. We are weak now, but with careful planning and hard work we will soon be strong again.”

Raphael stands abruptly, dragging the afghan with him. He scowls at it, big fingers plucking daintily at the loose loops of yarn tangled in the metal buttons of his loincloth before giving up and tearing it free.

He doesn’t look at Donatello as he walks away.

“Don’t forget to pack your undies, Mike,” he calls over his shoulder. “We ain’t commin’ back for nothin’ once we go.”

“Wait, seriously?” Michelangelo’s eyes move from their scattering of surfboards to the disco ball before settling on the fridge. He’d been Donnie’s partner in crime for that particular escapade and so had intimate knowledge of just how much of a pain it had been to find it in the first place. “I mean not right _away_ , jeeze, but even if somebody comes looking for us won’t they eventually go away?”

Master Splinter shakes his head, smiling faintly. “A ninja strikes from the shadows and leaves no trace, my son.”

Brushing the last of the granola from his lap, Leonardo makes to follow Raphael into the dojo. “I think that’s the Boy Scouts, Dad.”

The old rat, in his infinite wisdom, shrugs.

“We don’t know what all might be used against us, so we can’t risk any of it falling into the wrong hands,” Donnie explains. DNA plucked from the bristles of a toothbrush. Personality profiles reverse-engineered from notes carelessly scribbled into the margins of their meager library and the junk each of them has crafted into treasures. The possibility of what someone competent enough could make of the guts of his security system is terrifying all on its own.

The logic of it doesn’t make it any easier, though.

“Anything we don’t take,” he forces himself to finish, “we destroy.”

“Besides, Mikey...” Leo yanks playfully at his brother’s mask tails as he passes, ignoring the yelp of protest to wink at Donnie. “I don’t think you want the Foot going through your browser history.”

Michelangelo goes pale. Leonardo grins, brighter and fuller than he has in a long time, and lets out a bark of laughter. Master Splinter is alive. _They’re_ alive, and so is April O’Neil and all of the people of New York Sacks and the Shredder planned on murdering for the sake of money and power. Whatever wounds the fight has dealt them will heal in time, but until then they’ll sleep in their own beds tonight and worry about finding a new place to call home tomorrow.

Donatello tries his best to echo his brother’s expression, but it doesn’t take.

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Looks like an... –er fl... –out, Don.”

Donatello frowns down at the cracked screen of his phone and keys in an adjustment to the modified transceiver he’d jerry-rigged to it to boost its underground signal capacity. “Repeat that, Leo? You’re spotting out.”

“The whole place is... ” Leonardo’s voice fades back into static. He thumps the side of the transceiver irritably and adds "replace Leo’s phone" to the increasingly long mental tally of things to do after the move. “—ater up to our necks.”

With a huff of frustration, Donnie yanks the cap off of his red marker with his teeth and draws a large “X” across the old pumping annex under West 36th with more force than is strictly necessary. Leaning back to take in the map as a whole, an undeniable pattern is starting to emerge. “There must be a main busted somewhere. That’s everything southeast of the Port Authority flooded.”

“It’s th... _–ort Authority_ , bros.” Michelangelo’s voice has the tinny, faintly echoed edge of someone shouting to be heard over speakerphone. “What’d you expect?   Place... –ithole _above_ ground.”

“We’re going to try... –ing up 9th Avenue. What’ve you got between there and Central Park?”

Donnie squints at his list, forcing the doubled letters back into focus. “Two potentials and one unlikely-but-we-still-outta-look-at-it. Texting you the coordinates now.”

After three full days of searching Donatello is starting to go cross-eyed from pouring over the labyrinthine details of the New York City municipal water and sewage system. The official plans on file with the city are convoluted enough on their own, but they’re not looking for anything that could be turned up by the average construction company filing for digging permits. They’ve got their own maps of course, revised and expanded with each training run and scavenging mission and forbidden adventure while Master Splinter sleeps, but none of the secret spaces they played in as children are sufficient for their current needs.

That’s where the antique blueprints come in—the first a happy accident buried in the bottom of a box of moldy books, the rest originals stolen from the dusty bowels of the public works archives –the ink of the hand-drawn routes so fine and faded that they can’t be seen on any of the remaining digitized scans.

The part of him that can spend hours speed-reading the edit histories of Wikipedia articles feels more than a little guilty about the theft.

The much larger part of him that knows how hard it is to feed four growling teenage stomachs on food pantry rejects and the least-rotten contents of restaurant dumpsters and how much easier things get when illicitly-siphoned cryptocurrency is involved is grateful for the moral flexibilities built into ninjitsu.

Donnie’s the eyes in the proverbial sky for this operation, sifting and combining multiple data streams into something that makes sense in the physical world. Many sites he’s able to rule out through deductive analysis alone—an old sewer reroute under the East Village that got eight feet of water during Superstorm Sandy, an abandoned subway station still accessible and popular enough with taggers that it has its own Instagram tag—but the ones with the most promise are so lost within the bureaucratic cobwebs that they have no way of knowing what they’ll find until they go and take a look for themselves.

Mikey, with his badly hidden HGTV addiction, has proven himself an invaluable scout, even if the composition of his real estate photography sometimes straddles the line between conceptualism and deconstructed internet meme . His “exclusive virtual tours” are nauseating to watch, but he’s got an organic instinct for spaces that balances nicely with Leo’s own more checklist approach.   Between the two of them, they’re able to assess potential “properties” for both livability and defensibility almost as fast as Donnie can identify them.

“How do five freaking ninjas end up with so much _shit_?”

Raph, for better or worse, packs.

As instructed the brunt of their food, medical supplies, and weaponry are already packed up and ready for a quick exit, but if everything goes according to plan they should be able to carry a few more loads of supplies to their new home before being forced to scuttle the lair. Despite his grumbling and obvious dis-ease at letting any of his brothers out of his sight for long, Raph turns to his task with his usual brand of brutal efficiency , sorting their possessions by utility, sentimentality, and disposability with the same quick, decisive movements he uses when lashing out with his sais.

He quickly fills the battered duffels and big Ikea bags they use when scavenging with the rest of their kitchen, the spare components Donnie has set aside to use as the basis for their new security system, and the parts of their library Master Splinter has deemed too important to leave behind. When Leo and Mikey come back for a quick meal and to drop off the first five gigs of surveillance footage and sensor readings, he disappears into the tunnels for a quick trip topside, returning with an armful of emptied-out trash bags (“It was just shredded paper and office crap, Leo, I ain’t fucking stupid”) for their linens and several grease-stained cardboard boxes for anything else that will fit.

“Hey!” Mikey yelps when Raph dumps his milk crates full of records out onto the floor. “Watch the vinyl, will ya? Shit’s vintage.”

“You want a mint copy of _Think About It_ or you want to be able to see your fuckin' feet when you go take a piss?” Raph snaps, carefully filling the crate up again with Donnie’s lightbulb collection.

“I think you’re severely undervaluing Lyn Collins’ classic soul stylings and hip-hop legacy,” Mikey sniffs, but offers no further protests as Raph sweeps the contents of several color-coded metal baskets into the growing pile of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice If We Could."

Donnie wonders if maybe the brunt of the packing shouldn’t have fallen to him. Raph certainly doesn’t enjoy it, judging by the hard line of his jaw as he digs through their cache of toiletries and the occasional bangs and bursts of swearing from the dojo as he takes apart their training equipment. Most of the things they own Donnie either found himself or helped piece back together. Given nothing but a pencil and a big enough sheet of paper, he could probably diagram out the entire lair wire by wire with a complete annotated catalog of every stray pizza box, faded sticker, and hastily-stashed dirty magazine.

Then again, maybe that’s why his palms go slick every time he passes the stacks of packed belongings lined up beside the main hatch. Why he can’t look at the wall of stereos without feeling sick.

Why no matter where in the lair he goes, it feels like there are eyes watching him.

“Dibs on the shower,” calls Mikey by way of greeting several hours later.

“There is no shower,” Donnie reminds him, not bothering to look up from his typing. The pipe carrying pressurized fresh water to the rough concrete alcove Donnie had studded with sprinkler heads was severed by one of the explosions, and they’re back to sponge-bathing out of a bucket like they had as kids.  

Michelangelo whines piteously but makes a trudging bee-line to the bathroom anyway, peeling out of his soaked gear as he goes. Leonardo isn’t far behind, a familiar looming shadow reflected multiple times over across the scattering of dark, fatally wounded monitors. From the smell and the wet squeak of his shoes he doesn’t appear to have fared their latest foray into the sewers any better.

“I take it that decommissioned septic facility was a typo?”

“I don’t think it was ever formally commissioned,” Leo says flatly. “I think it bubbled up like a geyser from the depths of hell.”

Donnie wrinkles his nose sympathetically. “Scrub down before you give Master Splinter your report. We don’t want him getting an infection.”

 “No argument there,” Leo answers, clipped and professional. His battlefield voice. Donnie expects that to be the end of the conversation, but Leo’s silhouette lingers in his peripheral vision. “You should really get some sleep, now that we’re back.”

They’ve been resting in shifts since that first exhausted night, making sure there’s always someone awake to check in on Master Splinter or raise the alarm if needed. Donnie is way overdue for his turn.

He shakes his head and keeps his eyes fixed on the sluggish scroll of white on black text across the monitors. Between his hasty repair jobs and the heightened demands he’s placed on the remaining security systems all of his other programs have been lagging heavily. “Later. I need to finish modifying the city records before the system auto-archives at midnight.”

This piques Leo’s interest enough that he forgoes his usual lecture on Donnie’s poor sleeping habits. “I thought none of the places we were looking at were _in_ the official records.”

“Most of them aren’t,” Donnie explains, “which is part of the problem. If we wipe ourselves completely off the grid then sooner or later we’re going to have jackhammers coming through our ceilings and walls to make room for a skyscraper sub-basement or a new branch of the blue line.”

“The joys of New York real estate,” Leo grumbles. “So what are you turning the final contestants into?”

“Something crucial but low maintenance, too small to stand up in, and very, very, _very_ expensive to dig up, with lots of false leads sprinkled on top.” The more subtle alterations he makes to the records the less obvious it is which trail of breadcrumbs leads to their new home. It’s known by their enemies that they live underground; Donatello can’t change that, but at least he can make them a hell of a lot more complicated to find.

“Good thinking,” Leo says, a general once more. “Just...  Rest after this.  All right?”

Donnie nods jerkily, neck muscles tense in anticipation of a too-soft pat to his shoulder or brotherly flick to the back of his skull, but Leo keeps his distance, watching him work for a few minutes longer before drifting off to the bathroom.

Leo’s authority to give orders is still new enough that Donnie doesn’t feel guilty for not obeying its full intent. It’s hard to lie still for any length of time without the weight of sleep or his tech pack to counterbalance the too-light feeling quivering in his chest, but there’s a piece of an idea in his head that won’t keep quiet. He turns it over slowly, prodding at its undersides, the jagged edges and empty spaces where other pieces might fit, careful to keep his features soft and breathing even so as not to give himself away to the figures that linger occasionally in the archway.

When it’s Donnie’s turn to keep watch again he finds himself pacing the perimeter of the lair, dragging his hands along the pipes, the draped arcs of electrical wire, the seams of mortar between concrete blocks.  

After his twenty-eighth pass through the ghost of the kitchen he finds his father awake and watching.

“Such a long, troubled journey, my son. Might I walk it with you, for a while?”

He helps Master Splinter to the bathroom and back again, brings him fresh water and dried apple pieces to chew on while he checks his bandages for further bleeding. His sensei is healing nicely.

Donatello’s watch ends. He sleeps and dreams of lightning and hushed voices, of small white hands banging frantically against glass.

 

*

 

There are lots of things he could be doing. _Should_ be doing. Like hacking into the Riker Island surveillance feeds to watch Eric Sack’s prison transfer, or trying to find everything he can on the mysterious and still-hospitalized man known only as the Shredder, or scanning April O’Neil’s computer for article drafts and every single typed mention of “turtles” and/or “mutant vigilantes.” Things that aren’t sitting in the octagonal divot in the dojo floor with a growing mountain of scribbled over scrap paper and a mouthful of swollen gums from hours of gritting his teeth in frustration.  

He should be able to let this go. He should be able to make this _work_. He should...

He’d tried to explain it to Mikey, once, back when he’d first programmed his tech pack to take automatic readings of each of his brothers’ surface temperatures and heart rates.

“It’s like I get stuck,” he’d said, flipping through each of his goggle’s view modes and watching the orange-pink hues of Michelangelo’s latest graffiti design shift and bleed from night vision green to heat-sig black to muted tactical browns. “Like there’s a circuit looped somewhere and the current’s not powering anything but itself.  Know what I'm sayin'?”

“Not really,” Mikey had admitted. “Whenever I wanna do something I just—” He’d twirled the cans of spray paint through a rapid sequence of jabs and modified nunchaku strikes. “Whap whap bam shi- _kah_! Do it.”

Donnie had switched back to thermal view, fascinated by the contrast between the near-black of his brother’s plastron and the cool reptilian blue-green of his exposed skin. “Probably why you get in so much trouble.”

“Oh definitely,” Mikey had laughed, cheeks warming to brilliant gold.

Normally Donatello would use his jumble of monitors to its full display potential to help map himself out of a roadblock, but the main server bank is already starting to buzz and crackle angrily as it struggles to keep up with its heavy workload. He wishes he could take the whole system offline and give it the proper maintenance it so desperately needs, but with the uncertain threat of another Foot invasion running through the entire lair like a slowly building static charge it’s a risk he’s not willing to take.

Not that it matters all that much, long term. If the system doesn’t burn itself out before they leave he’ll just have to wipe and junk it anyway.  

He yanks at his necklace, the straps of his tech pack, rubs the heels of his hands back and forth along his thighs. His head feels like the inside of a movie projector with the film knocked loose and playing back at the wrong speed, everything crooked and punched through with holes and going too fast to make sense of any of the pictures. He shuffles his papers together, scatters them again, flicks back and forth along the long scroll of the open tabs on his touchscreen. Wishes fretfully for something to take apart, something small enough to cradle in his lap but tangled like a Gordian knot, metal components filmed with grease and studded all over with bolts that resist for a moment before giving under the relentless twisting of his fingers.

Finally, in a fit of desperation, Donatello tries to meditate.

“You’re gonna give yourself a serious crick in the neck, sleepin' like that.”

Raphael’s sudden appearance jerks him out of the light doze he’d drifted into after half an hour of trying valiantly to hold the upright half-lotus Sensei had taught them before curling over into the more natural-feeling child’s pose.

“Wasn’ sleepin’,” he mumbles defensively into the floor. The concrete feels good against his forehead, cool and reassuringly solid.

“Yeah, well, you probably should be, way you’ve been goin'. Don’t want you shortin’ out on us.”

Donatello is really starting to get sick of all the things he should be doing.

Raphael isn’t one to stand around and start conversations for the hell of it, which means that he wants something. With a dejected groan he pushes himself up into a sitting position and scrubs roughly at his face until the tingling sensation of draining blood dissipates.

Without his glasses Raph's face is little more than a barely defined blob of color, red bleeding into green and dark holes where his eyes and shades should be. “What’s all this?” he asks, gesturing at the fanned blur of papers scattered on the floor around him.

“Rough draft for a new offensive layer to our security perimeter. Interior-activated directed debilitating electrical pulse.” Donnie gives his glasses a quick polish with the tails of his mask before slipping them on, but Raph’s furrowed expression isn’t any easier to read in focus.

“So that’s... What? Like a force field?”

“Kind of.” He points to a diagram of a fractal network of circuits branching out from a central ring. “Think of it like a big circle. Inside, you flip a switch and it’s a safe zone that nobody can push past. Originally I was thinking of tying the switch to an automated sensor, but that would leave it vulnerable to any successful override of the security network as a whole, let alone the higher potential for accidental triggering.” Donnie does his best to make everything he builds absolutely Mikey-proof, but sometimes his best just isn’t good enough. “So now I’m leaning towards a manual trigger. Easier to build in a fail-safe mode plus it gives us more options to deploy it for pointed tactical maneuvers.”

“Makes sense,” says Raph, which is the thing he says when something doesn’t make sense at all. “What happens outside the circle?”

Donatello has seventeen pages of calculations, twelve journal articles, and four digital simulations at his fingertips he could use to answer that question in exact technical detail, but experience tells him that Raphael is looking for something simpler than that. Something blunter.

“Well," he says, "you die.”

Raphael’s eyes widen, nostrils flaring as he sucks in a deep, shuddering breath. The rest of him goes very, very still.

“That’s the theory, anyway,” Donnie huffs, fingers fidgeting idly with the sharp edges of his kusazuri. “I’m still trying to balance out the charge levels in case one of us _does_ accidentally get caught in it. But hey—” He smiles crookedly up at Raph. “—at least thanks to Sacks we know we know we can take kind of a lot, right?”

Raph doesn’t smile back. He stares at the jumble of papers for a long minute before turning away, rubbing the back of one hand against his mouth. In the kitchen, Mikey is singing “How Deep Is Your Love,” soft and off-key and intercut with a lot of vocal percussion.

“Look, Donnie, about what I said the other day. I just...”

The sudden change in topic confuses Donatello, as does the rough, tightly coiled quality of his brother’s voice. Like a rusted spring stretched slowly apart, the metal crumbling even as it tries to pull back in on itself. He waits for an explanation, brows furrowed and head tilted back, but the rest of Raphael’s thought seems to have evaporated into the air.

Raphael swallows, an up-and-down bobbing of his throat, and looks back down at the jumble of papers.

“C’mon,” he says, jerking his head towards the main hatch. “I wanna show you something.”

“Show me what?” Donnie asks, frown deepening.

“Just...” His hands curl into fists. Open again. “Something. Okay?”

Donnie hesitates, still lost within the conversation. His fingers itch to pull his goggles down, but none of the pattern-seek programs he’s written so far have proven effective at deciphering this particular kind of puzzle, so he defaults to his training.

He examines every part of his opponent—the awkward hovering of his hands, the hunch of his shoulders, his bared lower incisors, the way the light pools in the white corners of his eyes—and tries to piece together his intent. His next move. It’s easier in the dojo, where each motion and strike is repeated a thousand times until even his brothers’ movements feel like a part of his own body, hard-wired into his muscles and waiting for him to unscrew the protective plating for a closer look, but sometimes it works for this.

Michelangelo’s face—younger, eight maybe—his hands clenched in front of him and shaking, down on his knees before their sensei, round eyes locked on the long metal swords that they have not yet been allowed to touch.  

 _“Please_ ,” he says. Implores. “ _Please please pleeease...”_

With a sigh, Donatello gets to his feet, knees and ankles popping alarmingly as he straightens his legs.

Raphael leads him through the sewers to the access pipe that runs down to the oversized storm drains meant to keep the subway lines from flooding after prolonged periods of heavy rains. Between the frequently unpredictable water levels and the too-close surface proximity they usually avoid the storm culverts altogether, but the wide, mostly-flat tunnel is dry and empty for now.

Empty, that is, except for...

Donnie flips on one of his headlamps to make sure his brain isn’t just making pictures out of shadows and water stains.

“It’s a _van_ ,” he says, stunned.

“It’s a van,” Raph deadpans. “Ten points to Gryffindor.”

While this particular tunnel branches off from a culvert with easy surface access and completely ineffective security fencing, none of the skateboarders who like to drink and carve lazy arcs down the smooth concrete have ever pushed much further than the first bend, the smell and the dark enough to make them turn back towards the surface. Even the occasional groups of homeless people who use the culvert as shelter typically stick close to the mouth of the tunnel until a rainstorm forces them out again.

Which doesn’t mean that a human _couldn’t_ have had a good reason to try to hide a vehicle by driving it so deep underground, it’s just that the far more likely alternative is standing two feet behind him .

“You _stole_ a van.” Donatello does a double-take at the all-too familiar logo. “From _Sacks Industries_.”

Raphael’s reflected smile seems to fill the driver’s side window. “Figured they owed us one,” he laughs.

The van is white. Boxy—a cab over model, a slightly modernized revamp of a 60s-era Ford Ecoline—with round, bug-like headlights and hard lines running parallel down the length of its body.

It’s _beautiful_.

It’s also very badly parked, both side view mirrors missing and the right rear tire stuck high enough up the steep curve of the tunnel's edge that the rest of the vehicle tilts at an ominous angle. Donnie approaches the van cautiously, still too dumbfounded by the incongruity of it all to even pull down his goggles for a better look.  

“What happened here?” he asks, touching the long scrape down the driver’s side, yellow paint streaked across the exposed aluminum.  The left front tire, on closer inspection, is completely blown.

Raph shifts his weight from one foot to the other, grin fading. “I ain’t ever driven before, a’ight?”

The van is unlocked. Donnie opens the door and peers inside. “What happened to the _driver’s_ seat?”

Raphael scowls but remains silent. Glancing over his shoulder, Donatello takes in the hard lines of his massive arms crossed tightly over his plastron, the way the top curve of his shell looms larger than ever when he hunches over, and works through a quick bit of applied spatial geometry.

He gets the picture. That part of it, at least.

“I don’t understand.” He runs his thumb along the edge of the door, eyes darting from the dashboard to Raph and back again. Fully automatic, decent mileage. Shitty factory model stereo system. “Why would you—?”

“S’just...” Raph says haltingly. “Mikey told me how much of a pain it was getting the fridge, and I heard Sensei talkin’ with Leo about... But _I_ sure as hell ain’t carrying your computer shit no six fuckin' miles, so I thought—”

The metal doorframe creaks under Donnie's fingers. Dimly, he’s aware of his fingernails slicing long curves into the rubber door seal. “This is to help us _move_?”

The skin just under Raphael’s mask flushes dark green. “Basically.”

Donnie closes the door. Opens it again. Breathes in the sickly mix of pine air freshener and musty upholstery while his head spins with the possibilities.

“Did you check it for trackers?”

Raphael throws up his hands.

“ _It’s a catering van, Donnie!_ ” He sounds like he’s not sure if he wants to hug him or hit him. After fifteen years living together, Donnie knows the tone well. “They used it to bring in subs and fancy cakes and shit.”

Donnie spends almost an hour pulling out panels and scanning every inch of the undercarriage with his goggles before he’s satisfied that the van isn’t bugged. Raph grumbles through the entire process but complies immediately when Donnie asks him to lift the van high enough for him to slide underneath and check the last few shadowy pockets of machinery by hand.

“What’s the verdict?” he asks once Donnie slips free.

He tugs his goggles back up to resting position and straightens his glasses. “Well the good news is that Sacks isn’t as paranoid as I am. The bad news is that the suspension is shot and there’s no spare.”

“Oh you gotta be fuckin’—” He drops the van. “ _Shit_. Shit shit _shit_. I didn’t mean to snag you a lemon.”

Donatello wipes his hands on his leather underskirt.

“I can fix the suspension,” he muses. “Shouldn’t take too long. Probably needs reinforcing anyway, between the weight of at least one of us and whatever we’re gonna haul. And we’ve got those tires under the side table by the couch.”

Raphael shakes his head. “Not anymore. They got shredded in the blast.” He pauses, thinking. “What about those big tractor ones from the weight set? Think those could work?”

Something in his expression reminds Donatello of the way they all used to look up at Master Splinter when they were first learning their katas, the queasy anticipation as they braced for correction or approval.

He runs one hand along the curve of the engine’s air intake, fingers tingling as he traces the rim of one headlight. Licks his lips.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that might work.”


	3. Chapter 3

It starts logically enough. The shelves have to be pulled out completely if they’re going to use the van to transport any of the bigger items, and there’s no real point in fixing the suspension and replacing the tires without beefing up the transmission to accommodate the dramatic change in weight distribution. Then the seats need to be moved back, the pedals expanded, and given the rough treatment Raph had dealt it between here and Times Square it just makes sense to reinforce the van’s exterior with roll bars welded out of the cut-up frame of their couch and the disassembled weight rack. Since Donnie has the engine halfway apart already it’s not _that_ much more work to put it back together with a few odds and ends he’s scavenged over the years to optimize its fuel efficiency and horse power, and if he throws in a homemade nitro booster or four while he’s in there who can really blame him? They’re likely to go to waste, otherwise.

By the time he finds himself bolting solar panels and an old DirectTV dish to the roof, Donatello hasn’t run out of projects, but he has run out of excuses.

The lair is full of odd bits and pieces that aren’t valuable enough to their survival to expend much energy transporting them to their new home. He crams as many of them as he can into the van.

Michelangelo is psyched about the van, tossing out ideas for paint schemes and helping carry parts up to the makeshift garage whenever he has a spare moment.

Leonardo, not so much.

“The hell were you _thinking_?” he hisses to Raphael, tucked away in a dark corner where he apparently thinks Donatello can’t hear. “Like he’s not got enough to deal with already.”

“You think I don’t fuckin’ know?” Raph growls. “ _Christ_ , why do you think I—”

Cheeks burning, Donatello settles his headphones more firmly over his ear slits, pulls up one of his working playlists, and turns his attention firmly back to carefully disconnecting all of the non-essential pieces from his Frankenstein beast of a mainframe. He’s got a pretty good idea how the rest of the conversation will play out, and it’s not one he’s ever particularly cared for.

Five days after the Shredder’s invasion, Donnie’s list of possibilities and you-never-knows has been mercilessly pared down to three serious contenders spread out across Manhattan. None of them are perfect—nothing they’ve owned has _ever_ been perfect—but each has its own potential, its own weaknesses.

One way or the other, they’ll just have to make do.

“Which way are you leaning, Donnie?” Leo asks him over breakfast—tea and barely-expired MREs spread out over a picnic blanket of butcher paper blueprints.

He hasn’t yet spoken to Donnie directly about the van, mouth thin and diction careful whenever it’s brought up. It annoys Donnie, as do all the whispered non-conversations that seem to abruptly change subject whenever he steps into view. He chews fretfully on the edge of his tongue, brain and body jazzed on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and tries to translate his thoughts into something more ordered.

“They’re all going to need a lot of work.” Donnie’s made his own visits to inspect their structural integrity and run thorough checks for gas leaks, dangerous mold levels, and cross-sewage contamination within the fresh water pipes. The blueprints are covered in his notes, rough drafts of security grids and plumbing layouts crammed into every spare inch of the margins. He taps the diagram closest to him with the butt end of his fork. “This one’s the most defensible, but it’s far enough out that we’ll have to put in some serious travel time just to get basic supplies. This one—” He points to a second sheet of paper. “Good neighborhood, so-so utilities. With some digging I think I can patch us into a neighboring commercial grid—should take two weeks, maybe a month—but we’ll have to be careful about our power consumption if we want to go undetected. We’ll need to supplement with multiple generators to run anything more than the most minimal of systems.”

Leonardo frowns into his tea. “Will one or two of your generator bikes be enough, or do you think you’ll have to build more?”

“ _Ten_ generator bikes wouldn’t be enough,” Donnie huffs in frustration, tapping his fork more fervently against the scrawled equations showing just how many kilowatts they burn through in a day. “We’ll have to prioritize fuel scavenging until I can figure out how to siphon in gas from a supply line without blowing us all up.”

“Fantastic,” Leo sighs, propping his chin heavily on one hand. Donnie’s not the only one relying on inhuman amounts of caffeine to push through the exhaustion of the past few days. “What about the subway one? What’s _it_ got wrong with it?”

Donatello can feel his heart thumping heavily against his plastron. Absently, he brings his fork up to his face and starts to tap out the rhythm against the edge of his jaw, the dull, solid strike of cool metal against bone strangely pleasant.

“Well, I can tell you something _right_ about it,” he says. “See, I’ve been thinking about the whole parking issue. Y’know, for the van.”

Leonardo hums low in his throat, dimples downturned as he drains the last of his tea. The muscles of his shoulders, limp with weariness half a moment before, pull in tight and close, like he’s bracing for a strike.

Donnie alters the pattern of the fork. Straight eighth notes, now, measured and true.

“For the move we should be fine sticking with alleyways, somewhere discrete with manhole access and within easy transport distance of the new lair, but long term we’d need something that we can reliably secure. Like an _actual_ actual garage. I mean... Raph had a good idea taking it underground, but the storm drains aren’t gonna cut it once we start getting some serious rain rolling through, and we need to be street level if we wanna actually use it. I found a couple of auto shops in foreclosure that could work, and with all the buyouts and mergers I think I could forge a backdated transfer of sale to a dummy party without raising any flags. And there’s one about a three blocks over that’s practically on _top_ of the old line. Assuming it’s not caved in all the way, I could—”

“Donatello,” Leo interrupts. “About the van...”

No, _no_.  “I _could_ , Leo. You know I could.”

“I _do_ know,” he says slowly. “And it’s not that I don’t see the potential utility of a dedicated vehicle, I’m just not sure that...” His eyes keep drifting down to the silver blur of Donnie’s fork. Donnie ducks his chin reflexively, smacking himself in the cheekbone instead. It hurts, but only dully. “Are you listening, Don?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

“I know how you can get with projects—” Leo continues. “—and you’ve been spending a lot of time on this one. Taking a moment or two to work off some steam is okay, but right now, we have to keep most of our energy focused on our primary needs: food, shelter, safety. Our _family_.”

To his face, Leonardo is always careful to frame his concerns solely in terms of pure, infuriating practicality. His fingers curl white around the fork, forcing it still.

“I _am_ focused, Leo. It’s not... I’m not _playing_ with it. It’s not a _toy_.”

Leo sighs and looks back down at the mess of plans, rolling his empty cup back and forth between his hands.

“I believe you,” he says, in a way that makes Donatello itch with the certainty that he doesn’t.

 

*

 

Raphael understands the most, he thinks, this need to constantly be _doing_ , the clarity and calm only found when the body and most of the brain is caught up in a task. Wiring in extra speakers for surround sound, reprogramming the van’s satellite to intercept all digital law enforcement broadcasts as well as every ESPN affiliate, laying shag carpet over layers of homemade plate armor while Mikey goes to town on the outside with the box of hoarded Rust-oleum discards in green and yellow, all of that’s just a tool, something to keep his hands and brain busy until the clanging of the world settles back into a mostly-tolerable white hum.

Doesn’t mean Raph won’t do his brotherly duty and tease him about it when he brings up dinner, though.

“Looking nice, Donnie,” he says, his bulk nearly filling the open side door as he peers around the green-lit interior. “Very _Austin Powers Saves Christmas_.”

“The lights were Mikey’s idea.” Donnie squints down at the tangle of wires feeding into the rocket launcher control panel, tracing their routes with his fingers in far-sighted habit. His gut is telling him that there’s a cross somewhere there definitely shouldn’t be, but so far he hasn’t been able to find it. “He said they added ‘ambiance.’”

“Big shocker there,” Raph grumbles, eyeing the miniature disco ball. “The carpet’s all you, though, right?

There’s no use denying it. “Sound barrier and secondary shrapnel catcher all in one handy shagalicious package.” Plus it feels nice, long and silky like the alley cats that sometimes press their hard, pointed heads into his palms, looking for a scratch.

Raph nods. “I like it.” It’s probably the truth. Raph does enough of their sewing that he’s turned into a bit of a textile snob, but he’s the one who dragged home the worn velvet throw that used to live on the back of the couch. “’S gonna be a real pain to clean, though.”

Donnie shrugs. “Sometimes sacrifices must be made,” he says, frowning as he finishes his third careful inspection of the juncture box and finds nothing amiss. Despite the nagging worry telling him that he’s making a mistake, he closes the panel access and reaches for his screwdriver, but his sweeping hand turns up nothing. “Hey, Raph, have you seen my—?”

Raph holds up the heavily-abused Phillips-head, twirling it between his fingers like one of his sai.

“Thanks,” Donnie says, but when he reaches for it Raph pulls back.

“Trade ya,” he says, holding out a large bowl of something pale and goopy that smells just faintly enough of fish and creamed mushroom to be appetizing.

Donatello scowls at in on principal. “It’s not a trade if you’re holding all the goods to begin with it.”

“Goods for services, then,” Raphael grouses. “Either way, I ain’t leavin’ ‘til you eat. Don’t think I didn’t see you skippin’ out on lunch when Mike an’ Leo took Sensei out for the grand tour.”

Donnie rolls his eyes, but the vaguely liquid feeling in his joints tells him that it’s long past the time when he should have stopped to refuel.

He accepts the bowl and proffered spoon, tucking them into his lap and settling into a more comfortable position. The bowl is pleasantly warm; he’s about to ask for something to drink when the van dips unexpectedly, string lights swaying as Raph climbs inside. It’s not until Raph eases down next to him that Donnie notices the second bowl tucked into the crook of his brother’s arm and the rusted remnants of a six pack dangling from one finger.  

Donatello raises a brow ridge at the beer but accepts the faded gold can passed his way without protest. He tries not to think too hard about tetanus and expiration dates. “Any other contraband you need help smuggling over?”

“Nah, this is the last of it. Been saving it for a special occasion.” Raphael shifts the second bowl into his lap and cracks his own beer open one-handed. “Cheers.”

They clink cans.

Dinner is hot burner tuna noodle casserole, heavy on the canned peas. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible, either, and the texture is just sticky enough to feel good against the roof of his mouth as he chews. They eat in silence, shells propped against the van’s walls and knees almost close enough to touch. The beer is lukewarm and slightly sour. Between their size and their accelerated metabolisms the alcohol is barely enough to warm the back of his throat, but Donnie doesn’t mind. There’s something about sitting in the van’s close, muffled glow, taking long sips of it between bites of bland but filling noodles, that’s nice, that makes him think of why people call it liquid bread.

“Mikey and Splinter are leaning towards that place with the subway tunnel,” Raphael says at length.

Donatello closes his eyes and focuses on the sound of his brother’s chewing, soft wet flexes of muscle and bone punctuated by the scratch of the metal spoon against ceramic. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Liquid slosh against thin aluminum as he takes a long sip. “Leo still likes that one under 3rd, but I think Mikey and Sensei have about talked him out of it. They’re planning some topside scouting now”

Donnie opens his eyes and reaches for his own can.   “He just wants to be in the delivery radius of that soup place he likes.”

Raph frowns, brows furrowed. “That one with the fucking tiny crackers?”

Donnie snorts around his mouthful of beer, surprising himself. Raphael grins at him like he just won a prize.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s good minestrone. But they’re like—“ He holds up one hand, thumb and first finger held half a centimeter apart.   “—fucking _Chiclets_.”

Raph finishes first, crumpling his can in one fist and tossing it out the open back of the van where it clatters satisfactorily against the concrete before being swallowed by the dark of the tunnel.   Donatello takes his time scraping the last bits of tuna from the bottom of his bowl, then runs his cleanest finger around the inside of the rim. The sauce isn’t exactly savory-worthy, but calories are calories. Raphael wordlessly passes him his own bowl, and he licks it clean, too.

“Think it’ll be ready for the move?” Raph asks. He’s got his head turned towards the mountings for the plasma tv, but something about the set of his jaw makes Donnie think that he’s not looking at the van at all.

Donatello tilts his head back, draining the last of his beer in two smooth, slick swallows. When he tosses his can after Raphael’s, it skips like a stone across water.

 

*

 

“—oppit, ssss _’ah_ pit! _Nnnh,_ shhhhhah—”

“Donnie?”

“— _it! Shit_ , f’cknngh...”

“Hey, hey, _shhhh_. S’alright, you’re okay.”

“Nn _nnn_ knkt...”

“You’re okay, ‘s not real. You’re okay...”

That’s Michelangelo’s voice, off to his left, his fingers brushing across his shoulder. For a muddled, half-unreal moment Donatello thinks they’re small again, huddled together in some dank corner while Dad stands guard, tail occasionally sweeping across their sleeping forms in the same gesture he’d used to soothe them through fretful infancy. Groaning, he tries to push Mikey’s pinching fingers away, but his hand finds nothing but empty air, and he gropes blindly until his elbow bangs against something hard and curved.

Donnie jerks out of REM sleep with a gasp, ulnar nerve howling. Instinctively his body tries to retract the jangling, unresponsive limb, but it flops feebly against his plastron. He’s on his back. He’s on his back, he can’t turn over, all the soft parts of him are exposed and he _can’t turn over_ , they’ll—

“Shh...” Calloused fingers wrap around his own nerveless ones. “Shh, I’ve got you.”

Donnie fumbles with his good hand, finds a thick forearm covered in pebbled, scar-studded skin, and with that touchstone the world settles more firmly back into place.

He’s in bed, shell cradled by fiberglass and a comforter that smells like Ocean Mist Febreeze. There’s a pillow jammed awkwardly between his side and the edge of the bed, limiting his movement, and his too-long legs are cold where they stretch out across the floor. He must have kicked away his covers at some point—his muscles clench and tremble under the nothing weight of the damp lair air—but at least there’s a band of familiar, muscular warmth stretched out across his chest, pinning him down. Anchoring him.

His eyes dart around their sleeping alcove, still searching for the unknown threat his body insists is _there_ , right there, but without his glasses the lair is little more than vague abstractions of shadow, dark against dark. “M’k’y?” His mouth feels oddly tacky, each panting half-lungful of air rasping cold across the back of his throat, and he has to swallow twice before his tongue feels wet enough for speech . “Wha’s...?”

"Nothin’,” Mikey soothes. “Just a dream, dude.”

“Jus’ a...?” It _feels_ like something he should remember, looming just over his shoulder, but his mind offers nothing but smeared snapshots of a long tunnel that twists off into nothingness.

“A real fuckin’ bad one by the sound of it. But yeah. Dream.” He’s... Petting him is the only way Donnie can think to describe it. Sweeping his hand back and forth across the nerveless keratin of his plastron with firm pressure.

The spring under Mikey’s bed creaks in protest as he adjusts his position, propping himself up on one elbow to get better leverage to dig and press into the gaps between Donnie’s scutes. It can’t be comfortable on his side like that, even if Mikey is the only one short enough to still tuck his legs fully into his bed. A surge of guilt washes over him.

“Do you wanna talk about it? Your qi is like, _seriously_ whacked the fuck out.”

Donatello shakes his head. It feels hollow, yet strangely heavy. Overfull. Sucked dry. He can’t seem to catch his breath.  

_They took it, they TOOK it, all those small skittering fingers. Clear hard sealed airless he is floating—_

“Woah there, slow down. Deep breaths , bro. S’okay. In...”

_—there is nothing to pull him down._

“And out. In...”

_They’re going to peel him out of his shell—_

“And out. In...”

_— out of his SKULL and they’ll find..._

“You’re doing great, Donnie. You’re doing so great, just a few more.”

_They’ll find..._

“Aaaand out.”

It’s like Michelangelo has a hold of him by his sternum, fingers tangled between the thick cartilage of his anterior pseudo-ribs, pulling and pushing until Donatello’s lungs move the way he wants them to, slow and deep and steady.

Donatello lets him, rattling attention focused outward on his surroundings. Some things are where they should be. Michelangelo. Raphael. His computer pack hanging in its charging station, the red glow of its power indicator light pulsing faintly as it waits for him in hibernate mode. Other things have shifted. Leonardo’s bed is empty—he’s on watch duty tonight—but he can hear him moving out in the dojo, swords slicing through the air in the slow, precise rhythm of a kata.

Somewhere in the lair, buried under thick layers of graffiti and water-stained posters and tangles of cable, is the spot where they all slept together, that first night. Donnie’s forgotten exactly where.

Slowly, slowly, he starts to relax under Mikey’s rough massage. Raph—who usually snores like the C train taking a sharp turn—is suspiciously quiet.

“Better?” Mikey asks, once he’s gotten his heart rate back below 100.

Donnie considers the question carefully, probing at each part of himself in turn. His mouth still tastes sour and there are echoing corners inside his head that buzz distractingly with anxious thoughts, but the prickling numbness in his left hand has finally receded enough for him to feel the slightly raised puffiness of his own name tattooed in curving script across his brother’s arm. “Better,” he concludes.

“ _Hmm_. Want me to get out the basking lamp? I think I know where Raph stashed it.”

“I’m okay,” Donnie says, and for the moment, it’s the truth.

“Cool,” Mikey yawns. “Lemme know if you change your mind.”

“I will,” Donnie whispers, the lie soft and easy.  He’ll get up once Mikey is out again, all four limbs safely tucked back into his own bed. Leo won’t like seeing him awake, but maybe he can guilt him into going back through all of the blueprints just one more time. Or even better, help him climb up into the highest rafters so Donnie can trace back over the long loops of wire draped like delicate spider-webs all along the perimeter, one last attempt at scavenging what they can before they start their move tomorrow. Maybe then he'll...

Without noticing or intending to, Donatello drifts back into sleep.

_Wet stone curving under his palms. Tunnels stretching out into the endless black, their paths unknown. Sounds overhead, grinding like teeth, gunfire and the stench everywhere of humans. Deeper, DEEPER, they have to—_

The hand holding his squeezes tight, doesn’t let go even after he’s quieted his whimpering.


	4. Chapter 4

Raphael’s hunch proves right. 

Donatello isn’t there for the final moment of persuasion, but when they take a formal family vote on which site they’d like to make into their new lair (Donnie keeping his hands firmly pressed to the floor until he’s certain that Leonardo’s raised arm is no casual stretch) the decision is universal. 

“Yes!”  Mikey crows, both fists raised in victory.  “Fucking _yes_!”  He leans over and claps Donnie hard across the shell.  “Dude, this is gonna be so fucking _sweet_!”

“Michelangelo!  Language!”  Master Splinter’s brow is furrowed but his whiskers twitch up the same way they do when he laughs.  Mikey pulls back, still grinning, and doesn’t even complain when Sensei sets him to the standard ten flips. 

The new lair is bigger than their current home but not as open, a single, four-foot tall passageway connecting the skeletal remnants of a half-gutted pumping station with a 100 foot long section of two-track subway tunnel caved in at each end. 

The pumping station, with its ready supply of fresh water, is certainly large enough to suit their needs on its own, but it was the subway tunnel and its potential as a training space that had been the definite deciding feature.  It dates back almost a century, judging by the surviving electrical lines and the heavy iron ribs exposed by the crumbling stone and brick facade.   The east end is completely blocked, but there are promising voids in the western rubble and a faint movement of air that hints at an even larger space beyond, maybe even a drivable connection to the surface.  By Donatello’s best reading of the few surviving records, the tunnel had been in the midst of being widened for a station platform when the west end collapsed.  The damage had been significant but recoverable, but before workers could clear the obstruction there was a second, more catastrophic collapse further up the tunnel.  Eight men had been trapped inside until, in desperation, they started digging sideways, finally emerging in the dark, wet bowels of the pumping station. 

Corruption, financial ruin, and the eventual public buyout of the city’s remaining private lines had prevented any further attempts to re-open the line.  Donnie is thankful for whatever back-room mob deal lead to the original construction team hastily covering up their blunder in lieu of filing more official reports.  He just wishes the escaping workers had thought to make the connecting passage just a little bit _taller_.

“It’s like being in a freakin’ hobbit hole,” Raph complains on their first supply transfer, bent nearly double as he shuffles  along with a crate of canned goods tucked under each arm.  “Why we gotta camp out in the subway bit, anyway?  Think I could cozy up easy enough in one of them big pipes with just a blanket at this point.” 

“Well it’s _dry_ , for one,” Donnie explains.  “I need the waterworks as clear of our stuff as possible so I can run wiring and make the repairs needed for it to be habitable.  Or do you _like_ sitting around in the dark having unknown liquids drip on you while you shit in a bucket because the toilets don’t work?”

“Sounds like we’re gonna be shittin’ in a bucket for a while either way,” comes the grumbled reply.  “Unless I overlooked the rail-side powder room first time around.”

“It’s called a fixer-upper,” calls Mikey from further ahead.  “That’s what makes it so great!  Just focus on the potential, Raphie-boy.  Poe-ten- _chal_!”

“I’ll fix _you_ up,” Raph snarls.  “See how much you like havin’ to duck walk into the dojo every morning once you hit your final growth spurt.  Or should I say _if_ , short stuff?” 

Mikey grins over his shoulder, teeth eerily white in the bobbing light of their headlamps.  “Don’t hate me ‘cause my ass fits in off the rack Nike, brah.”

 "Knock it off, Mikey.” One of Donnie’s cameras spins to offer him an over-the shoulder view of Leo trudging along behind him, dragging a sledge packed high with the raw components of their new security grid.  He’s wearing the closed-in expression he puts on when he feels one of them rankling under his orders, but underneath the mask his eyes are bright and one corner of his mouth twitches upward traitorously.  “It’ll be cramped for a while, but we should be able to dig it out as big as we need it.  Right, Donnie?”

Whatever his earlier reservations, now that a decision has been made Leonardo embraces it wholeheartedly as if it was his plan the entire time.  Back at the old lair (or “home”, as Donnie’s brain refuses to stop calling it), he spends most his time hunched over Donnie’s blueprints, peppering him with questions about surface access routes and flooding patterns while he examines each scribbled-in component of the ever growing schematic.  After a while he starts adding his own notes on top of Donnie’s near-illegible scrawls, carefully labeling each room and dotted-out excavation proposal with its designated primary purpose in neat block print.  Dojo.  Power room.  Security.  Weapons storage.  Main access point.  Emergency escape route one.  Emergency escape route two.  Alternate emergency escape route one.  Infirmary. 

Donnie hitches his heavy tool bags further up his shoulders and ducks his head to avoid a low jut of stone. “We’ll need to be careful around the caved-in areas until we’ve had a chance to shore everything up, but this part near the pump station is basically bedrock.  We could dig hallways tall enough to do back flips down with no problem.”

“And then, on to the main remodel!” Mikey chirps in the airy, too-bright tone of his favorite interior designers.  “Just picture it, dudes.  Five bedrooms!  A guest bath!  A tiny closet all of Raph’s very own for him to go sulk in when he’s been a naughty turtle!”

Raph kicks out at him but misses, stubbing his bare toes against an unseen hunk of rock.  Leo laughs, a single, loud “Ha!” that echoes slightly down the empty passageway behind them. 

Despite his own not-infrequent yearns for privacy, the idea of actual, distinct bedrooms still makes Donnie come up short.  Over the years each of them in turn has lugged his bed off to some relatively shadowed corner in an attempt to establish a modicum of personal space, but they’d all eventually ended back in the same heavily postered alcove, the comforting habit of a lifetime sharing a sleeping space with three breathing bodies too difficult to break.  He wonders what it will be like, alone for the first time in the dark. 

“Woah there!” Donnie’s so busy looking out for overhead obstacles that he doesn’t notice the slick patch of calcite deposit until his feet are halfway out from under him.  Leo appears just as suddenly out of the dark to catch him by his shell.  “You alright?”

If Donatello tries hard enough, he can pretend that the jump in his heart rate is entirely the fault of his slip. 

“Fine,” he pants, curling his toes tight in his boots until the faint tingling sensation in his soles fades. “I’m fine.” 

 

*

 

It’s better when he’s driving the van.

It’s not just the rumble of the engine beneath him, or the security of having one brother crammed into the passenger seat close enough to brush with his elbow while the other two hover at his shoulder, swaying and knocking against each other with every turn.  It’s the control, his hands on the wheel, his  foot on the pedals, two and a half tons of steel and garish paint responding to every twitch and impulse as smooth as thought.

Even if his thoughts aren’t always so smooth.

“Not so easy, is it?” Raph sneers after Donnie narrowly avoids busting a tail light on the corner of a dumpster backing out of an alley.  Donnie cringes, the worn leather of the steering wheel creaking beneath his tight knuckles, but Raph throws back his head and lets out a breathy bark of laughter.

“Nobody’s perfect!”  Donnie shoots back, annoyed.  “I’m getting better!”

“Sure are, Don,” Raph says, teeth glittering around his toothpick.  “Sure are.”

Under the cover of dark they’ve finally started moving over their beds and other items too large to  be hand-carried, Raph riding shotgun while Leo and Mikey race ahead underground to help unload.  The van is too conspicuous and New York traffic too notorious to risk any daytime trips, so they cram each load as full as the can until the van sags low on its axels, the muffler scraping sparks against the pavement whenever the road bumps unexpectedly. 

They’re all uneasy about leaving Master Splinter alone for so long, but with four hands set to the task they manage to move the major bulk of their belongings pile in a single night.  It’s well past four in the morning when they all finally bundle into the van, exhausted and grime-streaked, the threat of their sensei’s worried cluckings driving them home faster than the first grey tinges of dawn looming just beyond the horizon. 

Donnie knows he should keep his eyes locked on the road ahead of them, but he can’t help but obsessively scan each dark storefront and looming ally mouth for the glint of steel and the hollow glow of plastic masks.  Surely the Foot are out there, eager and watching for the perfect moment to seek their revenge, but the drive back to the storm culvert is unnervingly uneventful.  This late the streets are as empty as they ever get in the city, and with the interior lights off the turtles are invisible behind the patterned and tinted glass.  The van draws a curious glance or two, but even at this hour there are enough cars with bigger rims and brighter paint jobs cruising neon up and down the streets that they merge seamlessly into the traffic, the guttural rumble of the van’s souped-up engine swallowed by the smoky chorus of unmuffled exhausts and thumping bass lines. 

“They’re so close.”  

Donatello glances over his shoulder to see Michelangelo with his nose pressed flush against the glass, staring at the little huddles of people walking up and down the icy March sidewalk while they wait for the light.  Raphael is right behind him, his mouth thin.  In the passenger seat, even Leonardo appears transfixed, passing headlights throwing his furrowed features in and out of shadow as he watches a man bent over the open window of a taxicab, gesticulating wildly as he argues with the driver, three women in matching coats laughing as they stumble drunkenly through the crosswalk, another woman and her dog standing silent and still on the street corner, the smoke from her cigarette curling like a sigil across the slowly graying sky.  

Mikey looks back at him, blue eyes huge in the rearview mirror.  “They look so different,” he says.  “From up here, I mean.”

“Yeah,” says Raph.  “Not nearly as much leg.”

“Yeah,” Mikey echoes, shaking his head.  “Too bad.”  Then, after a moment’s pause:  “When are we gonna tell April that we’ve moved?”

Raphael looks at Donatello.  Donatello looks at Leonardo.  Leonardo doesn’t look away from the people on the sidewalk.

“Later,” he says.  “Once we’re more established.  It’s for her safety as much as ours.”

“You still don’t trust her?”

Leo meets Donnie’s eyes briefly in the rearview before turning in his seat to answer his youngest brother’s question. “I trust family.”

“She _is_ family.”

“ _Exactly_.  And right now, she’s safer not knowing where we’re going.  The longer the Foot think we’re not in contact with her, the better.”

Donatello’s hands flex on the steering wheel.  Nobody mentions Vern or the Deal.  Nobody has to ask how long until he can be fully trusted.

(He can’t.  He’s not family.  All Leonardo has to do is say the word and Donatello will—)

The light turns green.  Donnie drives on. 

 

*

 

Less than twelve hours later, the Foot finally come.

With his modifications to the sensor grid they get an extra 37 seconds’ warning this time around. 

In a way it’s almost a relief to hear the alarms screaming, like the first burning lungful of air after a deep dive.  

Mikey is the first to move, leap-frogging over last vestiges of equipment until he reaches Splinter’s bedside.  “Ding-dong, Avon calling!”

"Fuckin’ _finally_ ,” Raph grunts, sais glinting red in the flashing emergency light.  “Was starting to think we wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye.”

“Stick to the plan, Raphael,” Leo grunts as he tosses chunks of concrete away from what used to be the weapons wall, re-opening the breach.  Better an open doorway for their enemy to breeze through than risk the chaos of another pinpoint explosion.  “How many, Donatello?”

Donnie’s eyes dart across the monitors, collating the multiple camera feeds with the modem screech stream of audio signals being fed to him by his headset. 

“Twelve at least.  Fifteen, maybe twenty.  Two teams like last time.”  Only half of them are masked, and there’s no question that this time they won’t be shooting tranquilizers.  One passes so close to a camera that Donatello can pick out his features even with the grainy night vision.  His throat convulses involuntarily.  It looks like one of the technicians from Sacks’ lab, the one who’d stood calmly by programming the autotransfuser while four men shocked him again and again under his armpits and throat until he’d lifted his arms into the needle-lined cuffs waiting for him.  He can’t be sure, though.  So many humans just look the _same._

“Any near the van?”

“Van’s clear!” he shouts, flicking rapidly from one feed to the other.  “Culvert exit is clear!”

“That’s our cue, Sensei.”  With one fluid motion, Mikey slings their last bag of essential supplies over his shell and scoops Master Splinter into his arms.  “Time to blow this popsicle stand!”

From the depths of his blankets, the old rat raises one wizened paw, stilling Michelangelo for just long enough for him to take a final, unblinking survey of the Lair.  All of the graffiti has been whitewashed clean, the soft, colorful artifacts of their lives gone or heaped together like so much garbage, the concrete space once more the looming creature of shadow and exposed infrastructure they had discovered so many years ago.

Mikey shifts from one foot to the other.  “Sensei?”

With a final, whiskery sigh, the old rat dips his head, raises it again.  His eyes are hard and clear.

“Be careful, my sons.”

“You too, Dad.”  There’s the faintest of cracks in Leonardo’s bedrock of a voice.  Donatello ducks his head low between his shoulders, trying to shake off the shiver it sends down his shell.  “See you at the rendezvous.”

Donnie’s too busy running through the final lines of the termination program to watch them disappear into the tunnels, but his security feed gives him one last glimpse of Master Splinter’s black eyes and raised fingers over the green curve of Mikey’s shoulder before the camouflaged exit seals and locks into place.

Leo  heaves an extra chunk of concrete in front of it for good measure.  “Raphael—”

“That’s the last of it!”  The metal gas can Raph’s been using to douse the remainder of their belongings thunks hollowly to the floor.  “Stand back!”

There’s an unmistakable snapping of flares, then a low whoosh as fire sweeps over the pile.  A yellow glow fills his monitors.  Donatello shifts slightly to block the glare, muscles straining with the effort not to look back.  He checks his monitors every few seconds, following his brother’s progress through the darkened tunnels.  There’s still no sign so far of human activity in the storm drains, but then again he hadn’t had much time to install more than the most rudimentary of security sensors in their makeshift garage.

“Raphael, Leonardo, status.”

Scrape of shell against brick as his brothers jams themselves into their designated position, braced with both feet against the immense iron conduit running immediately above the re-opened hole in the weapons wall. 

“We’re ready, Donnie.” 

He reaches up, yanks his microphone in place, and hits the speed dial for Mikey’s phone.

“Y’ello!”

“Michelangelo, status.”

“Buckled in and ready to boogie!” comes the slightly staticy reply.  “Just say the word!”

“Storm drain and road are still clear,” Donnie reports.  “Hit it!”

“It’s hit!” Mikey whoops, barely audible over the ear-splitting squeal of tires and startled rat.  “Give ‘em hell, dudes!”

That just leaves Donnie.  His fingers race over the keyboard, keying in the final command sequence for full system self-destruct.  He can’t think about the full repercussions of what he’s doing, the data he hadn’t gotten the chance to back up that will now be lost forever. 

The computer, unfailing and loyal to the last, prompts him for the kill switch’s final authorization code.  Warns him, in unflinching Courier New, of the finality of this particular course of action.

“Donatello...”

“Done!” he calls, jamming the execution key so hard it almost breaks.  “It’s—”

The monitors flicker, go dark for two, heart-wrenching seconds, and then blaze back to life with an angry flurry of beeps.

No.

_No!_

How could he be so—

“Donatello!”  Leo’s voice echoes around the empty Lair, crack deepening.  “ _Now_ would be a good time to—”

“Hold on!”  He scans the code frantically, searching for his error.  It’s something small, some misplaced keystroke or forgotten bracket.  Something easily overlooked in the chaos of these last few days.

“ _Donatello!”_  

“ _Hold on!_ ”  His eyes burn with the strain of rapidly sifting through thousands and thousands of lines of code.  He can feel his heart thumping all the way down to his fingertips.  A monitor at the edge of his warped peripheral vision shows a cluster of Foot literally at their doorstep, the guided strike force pausing briefly to assess the unexpected gap in the rubble.  The right flank soldier raises his hand, fingers flashing in a rapid, silent, silent signal, and the group adjusts their formation, preparing for the breach.  “Hold on hold on hold—”

“ _Now, Don!_ ” Raph roars.  “Now now n—”

Donatello runs out of time.  The first of the Foot soldiers burst through the gash in the weapons wall just as he spots the errant typo in his code, leaving him no choice but to slam his fists through the main control panels and rip blindly into every drive and circuit board his clawing fingers can reach.  _Fuck fuck fucking shit fuck fucking—!_

The first line of Foot drop swiftly to their knees, guns raised and green laser sights glittering across the gathering smoke as they spray the Lair blindly with cover fire.  More pour in behind them, too many to count, and that’s when Leo and Raph kick out hard as they can against the ancient, two-foot thick pipe, grunting with the strain until their combined strength sheers through the rivets at each branch of the connecting joint.  The pipe rips free with an angry groan, drowning the entryway with a high-power blast of water that sweeps all but a handful of Foot soldiers immediately off their feet. 

They don’t even get the chance to scream.

Donnie barely manages to leap out of the way of the rising crush of water.  All of the nights he spent smearing caulk into every crack and crevice and coating the exposed limestone with his own special mixture of water-stop paint in a vain attempt to keep the lair as dry as possible finally pays off.   Clogged with rubble and human bodies, the blast hole isn’t big enough to drain away such a massive torrent of water.  The lair begins to flood, the filthy water quickly swallowing the low platform where Sensei taught them their first kata. 

Safe on a high catwalk, eyes protected from the smoke of the now-raging fire by his nictacting membranes, Donnie dares to look down.

The crashing, churning water almost looks like blood from up here, the foam peaks and dark valleys glittering red from the fire and still-flashing alarm.  The burn pile is on relatively high ground, but by Donnie’s calculations it should take less than five minutes for the rising tide to douse the base of the flames and reach what’s left of his computer station.  There’s some consolation in knowing that at least part of his plan worked exactly as he’d conceived it, that the water will destroy what his faulty code could not.  What isn’t already burnt beyond informational value, the sewers will wash away.  Same as it does the bodies of the drowning Foot soldiers.

“You okay?” Raph pants as he and Leo join him on the catwalk.  Donnie’s stomach churns, eyes still transfixed on the chaos and death below.  He opens his mouth to answer.

Twin, deafening, blasts, not from below but from _above._ The catwalk twists beneath them, rusted, overstrained metal buckling under the shock wave.  A calloused hand catches him, yanking him towards safety as twin waves of Foot reinforcements zip past them on rappel lines.  One of the soldiers does an almost-comical double-take as he drops down into the flooding lair—obviously they weren’t expecting the turtles to make their escape up _towards_ street level—but it’s too late for most of them to pull themselves back out of the flood.    

 _Odd_ , Donatello thinks, head still ringing and feeling strangely disconnected from the rest of his body as he lashes out at the few soldiers who managed to drop onto the teetering catwalk.  Most of the first wave are armed with automatic rifles, which they start firing immediately up into the pipeworks as soon as they find footing amid the rushing water, but the ones filling in behind them to form a wall between the turtles and what’s left of the console room are all carrying the souped-up cattle prods and electrified harpoons they used to herd them back on the mountain.  Looks like they’ve learned the value of keeping their distance in a fight, and the reek of ozone tells him that they’ve cranked the juice as high as it can go. 

“Good for them,” Leo says, once the last of the Foot has been knocked screaming over the hand railing.  Donnie hadn’t even realized he’d spoken the thought aloud.  “Now _climb._ ”

Raph is already halfway up the thin metal ladder leading to the next catwalk high, high above, the fringe of his studded loincloth clinking softly as he climbs.  Leo all but pushes Donnie up the first few rungs, barking orders until Donnie’s hands and feet remember the correct combination of right left left right needed to haul him vertical.  Gunshots ping off of the metal and stone around them, some burying themselves into the hard scutes of his shell with discordant _thunks_.  Leo keeps shouting at him, urging his slowly numbing body to _climb, climb, CLIMB,_ while below them the Foot shout their own orders among themselves, human voices clashing and swelling and _bursting_ as the listing catwalk finally crumbles beneath them, crashing into the water below.

In the chaos of it all, he doesn’t even hear the fateful shot.

Raph slips from the ladder with a yelp of surprise, tumbling backwards and out of Donnie’s reach before the shots have finished echoing in his overloaded eardrums.  He thinks he screams—he can’t be sure, everything is so _loud_ and bright and dark and smoke sour flame crackle flashing sloshing _thrumming_ —, but before he can finish shaping his mouth around his name Raph catches himself one-handed on the next to last rung, feet scrambling to steady himself as his momentum swings him out and back in again, slamming shell-first against the stone wall with a sickening crack. 

Donatello doesn’t remember what the Foot soldier crows in triumph before the throwing star buries itself wetly in his throat.  Doesn’t remember throwing it (maybe Leonardo...?), doesn’t remember flipping off one wall and another until he’s level again with his brother, his bad shoulder screaming itself into silence as it takes Raphael’s full weight while the rest of his limbs scrambled to pull them rung by rung up into the safety of tangled pipework. 

He does remember Leonardo’s hands, strangely disembodied as they reach out from the shadow-swallowed interior of a large, jutting pipe to grab him by the shoulder straps, but only later.  Here, now, it goes like this:  Raph falls, Donnie’s lungs burn, up becomes down and down becomes up and he completely loses track of his position relative to the universe until Leo pulls them both over the mildewed lip of the pipe and they collapse in a heap of sweat-slick limbs, Raphael gasping faintly in pain.

No time to think, to regroup.  Act, _act_. 

The pipe is too dark and cramped for a visual examination.  Donnie runs his hands mercilessly over his brother’s body, feeling for the wound, and finds wet warmth gushing out of the tender, exposed flesh above his hip.  His fingers quickly pinpoint two holes half a palms’ breadth apart: a quick in and out, too shallow, he hopes, to graze anything vital. 

“Here,” he says, grabbing Leonardo’s fluttering hands and pressing them tight to the wound.  “Here.”

“Is he dead?” Leo asks, wild and too close, his breath briefly fogging his glasses.  “Donnie, is he _dead_?”

“I ain’t fuckin’ dead,” Raph wheezes. “ _Shit_ , Leo, you—”  The rest of whatever he was going to say evaporates as Donnie’s still-searching touch moves up to his neck and down his arms, his right hand finding an unnatural bulge in the curve of Raphael’s bicep. 

“They got him in the arm, too,” he says, forcing himself to ignore his brother’s strained snarls of pain.  Everywhere he touches feels slick, slick, slick.  “I don’t think it’s broken, but I don’t feel an exit.”

“Those fuckers,” Raph mumbles.  “Those fuckin’, motherfuckin’...”

Donatello keeps his grip tight against the leaking bullet wound as he fumbles one-handed with the purple cloth wrapped around his arm.  It’s a pitiful bandage, all things considered, but it’s better than nothing. The clean gauze tucked away in his belt he hands over to Leonardo.  “We need to get him out of here before shock sets in.”

“You’re telling me,” Leo says as another burst of gunfire pings off of the metal mouth of the pipe.  “Where does this pipe go?”

Donatello sweeps out blindly with one arm, remembers his goggles, and toggles quickly through the settings until the darkness snaps into focus.  There’s a thick, heavily-rusted grate that he’d probably need his welding tools to cut through, and beyond that a series of forks too narrow to get any of their shells through.  “Nowhere we can follow.”

“So much for plan B,” Leo says.  “How many more shuriken do you have on you?  Think we have enough between us to clear us out some breathing room?”

Donatello switches to tactical vision, crawls back over the faintly twisting lump of Raphael, and peers over the lip back down into the lair.  The still-crackling bonfire is a blind spot that blurs half of his display, but after a moment’s adjustment he can make out the Foot soldiers struggling to close the feed valve for the gushing pipe while another sloshes through the now thigh-deep water, planting charges along all of the blocked up drainage points.  Behind a shield of prod-wielding guards, three more are at work at the half-gutted computer, one keying in a long line of code into a sluggishly blinking monitor while another busily jams transfer cables into the back of the main console.  Nobody is attempting to follow them upwards, and all of the soldiers firing up into the catwalks are braced as if they’re holding a line.

Puzzled, he adjusts the zoom on his goggles until he can more or less read what the Foot soldier is typing.  This guy knows his stuff; this is no 15 year old programming language, this is a cutting-edge tracer, dredging through the scattered remnants of his system for his hacking logs.

Donnie bites his tongue in frustration—so much for all the work he’d put into making the new lair look like it didn’t exist—but the Foot soldier passes over his most recent files without a second’s glance, digging deeper until all all-too-familiar ISP address flashes across the screen, along with the program he’d surreptitiously downloaded onto her phone to track her movements through the city.

“Oh fuck,” he says, tongue thick.  Stupid, _stupid_ , he should have—

It’s not _them_ the Foot are after.

It’s _April_.

April’s knowledge, her _father’s_ knowledge.  The boxes of files and notes she’d strapped onto the back of her bicycle before disappearing into the night, calling a promise to lay low until the situation was more stable.  Why risk further casualties fighting mutated super-ninjas when everything they needed to recreate them was guarded by a 5’4” reporter with an all-too-breakable human neck?  And if Raph bleeds out in the meantime, well that’s just a bonus, isn’t it?

“—nie?  Do you hear me?  What’s—”

“I gotta go,” he says.  His legs tremble beneath him like two tightly coiled springs.  “Leo, it’s _April_ , I gotta—”

“Go wh—hey!”  Leo grabs him by the tech pack as he leaps, tries to pull him back, but he can’t hold it and keep Donnie’s hands away from the release buckles and the same time.  In two clicks he’s free.

Falling, falling.  Donatello has half a moment for doubt, but he shoves it to one side, attention focused on angling his body through the narrow gap between two sprays of gunfire, catching hold of a low jut of pipe and swinging around it once, legs tucked close to his body, before releasing.  He lands hard on the topmost strut of his monitor rig.  Strong as he built it, it still collapses under his weight and momentum, toppling forward to crush the hapless Foot soldiers caught underneath. 

Any second now Leo will come tumbling after him.  “Keep pressure on the wound!” he shouts, and almost pays dearly for the momentary distraction as a Foot soldier levels an electric harpoon and fires.  Donnie barely twists out of the way in time, but a shattered scream behind him tells him that another Foot soldier wasn’t so lucky.  Ignoring the man now pinned to the battle station, Donnie grabs hold of the faintly electrified tether, teeth biting his tongue bloody as the water intensifies the shock, and yanks as hard as he can.  With a yelp of surprise, the man holding the harpoon falls into the still-rising flood, the gun slipping from his fingers as he disappears under the blood-black tide. 

It’s hard to keep track of his enemies with all of the splashing, the jumble crash of the water careening off every surface until it threatens to drown him.  His goggles are off-line without the connection of his pack, but the pressure against his sockets helps him focus, gives his brain a fixed point he can use as reference.  He does a quick headcount, and yes, they’re all in the water.  Now, _now_ , it has to be—

Donnie’s fingers are almost numb with adrenaline, but they manage to find the quick release for the metal tether at nearly the same moment that his other hand fumbles across the power switch for the electrical charge.  He presses them both, catching the reel of still unfurling metal line before it can fall into the dark, churning water, and swings wide with the now-harmless gun, striking a rushing Foot soldier hard across the temple.  The man drops bonelessly into the water, but not before Donnie relieves him of his cattle prod.

“Donnie, what the _hell_ are you doing?!  Get the _fuck_ back up here!”  Leo’s using his commander voice again, or at least trying to.  With the blood of one brother smeared thickly over his hands, it seems to lose much of its edge.  Still, it’s hard _not_ to obey, not to answer as he’s been conditioned to for so many years.   He shakes his head roughly, teeth bared and mouth hot with copper, and focuses all his willpower on wrapping the cut end of the metal tether securely around the shaft of the cattle prod.  

More Foot soldiers rush him, guns swinging up to aim at the soft flesh of his neck.  He ducks low, careful not to accidentally waste the prod’s charge on them, and sweeps out with one leg to knock one man into the other.  Their guns continue to spit rounds as they fall, fingers tight around the triggers.  A bullet ricochets off of his plastron, another grazes his cheek, a third and fourth hit yet another Foot soldier charging up behind him, blood bursting out of his chest like the petals of a chrysanthemum.

“Stay out of the water!” he shouts, leaping deftly over a final clump of still-armed Foot that stand between him and his goal.  The rest won’t stay down for long.  Already he can see them struggling to pull themselves upright against the ever-increasing current, one reaching out to help his comrade pull free the harpoon pinning him to the computer while another reloads his rifle behind the meager cover of a hunk of rubble.  He can only hope that Leo hears him over the pounding of the burst main and the deafening thump of Donnie’s own heartbeat.  “If it doesn’t shut off, use one of the bokken to knock me loose!”

“ _DONNIE!_ ”  Leo’s howl of horror is all too clear, all too familiar, but too late, too late.   “Donnie, _NO!_ ”

The main junction box is waiting for him, open and exposed, an angry maw already sparking and spitting under the strained load.  Donatello shifts his grip on the cattle prod, flipping it up over his shoulder like a spear, and feels every muscle along the long line from his raised palm down to his braced, booted feet lock into their singular, powerful purpose.  White hot electricity arcs across the prod’s pronged tip and down the metal tether, connecting him for a few moments more with the machine that was his shield, his window to an unfathomable world, a part of himself he could take apart and put back together even when the rest of him felt broken beyond repair.

Screaming.  Above him.  Behind him.  Everywhere.  Some of it human.  Some of it not.  Some of it his own.

He rams the cattle prod home. 

There’s a smell, or maybe a taste.  Inside of his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his bones.  Sour, burning, and bright. 

He thinks about the candles they used to light, trying to keep monsters away.

Then he doesn’t think about anything at all. 


End file.
